Is your iPad an entrepreneur-ready iPad?

We see entrepreneurs as people who are working hard, often traveling a lot and thus are in big need for mobility. They need to always be informed and in touch with their partners and employees. The iPad is a great tool for that. We thought we’d help out with some suggestions for great apps that shouldn’t be missing from an entrepreneur’s tablet.

Things

If you like to work with to-do lists, this is the app for you. Your iPad shouldn’t miss the Things app, which allows you to manage and schedule tasks, notes and projects.

iThoughtsHD

Keep your thoughts organized, create complex mind maps for your projects with iThoughtsHD.

Flight Trac Pro

If you’re in the air a lot, Flight Trac Pro is an app you shouldn’t miss. It helps you keep track of all your flights, allows you to import information from confirmation emails from airline companies and even sends push notifications with real-time changes to your flights.

Omnigraffle

When inspiration hits, don’t miss out on any idea and transform it into a wireframe on the spot. Omnigaffle for iPad is there to help you easily create diagrams, charts, page layouts or website wireframes.

SyncPad

Use your iPad to share ideas and sketches with your co-workers. With SyncPad you can have real time brainstroming sessions and group sketches with remote partners.

Bloomberg

Bloomberg is an app that helps to keep yourself informed on the most important financial news. It also allows you to define your own set of stocks that you want to follow.

Mint.com

Keep track of all your business’s finances with Mint.com for iPad. It allows you to keep all your accounts in one place, set up and follow your budget and keep a close eye on your cash flow.

Dropbox

Never miss an important file because you forgot to take it from your home or office computer. Dropbox is an application that shouldn’t miss from any of the devices you’re using, and it shouldn’t be missing from your iPad either.

GoodReader

GoodReader gives you a nice way of reading PDFs and other types of documents on your iPad. It even allows you to sync your files with remote servers or file storing applications.

Instapaper

Don’t miss out on info just because you don’t have the necessary time right now. Postpone reading certain web pages with the help of Instapaper.

The Roadshow we were telling you about earlier is continuing. Sofia was a great experience and we’ve set the dates for some of the remaining cities. Tomorrow, that is September the 30th, we’ll be in Belgrade, attending the Open Coffee meeting, taking place at Krug Dvoje, at 19:00.

We’ll be in Cluj on the 6th of October, starting at 18 o’clock, in Zorki Pub (Str. Ion Radiu, Nr. 10). For more detalis about this event, click here.

Craiova, please welcome us in Murphy’s Pub (str. Panait Musoiu, nr. 5A, Craiova), on 13 October, starting at 19 o’clock.

We’ll keep you posted about the dates for the other events, stay tuned!

Update: We’ve had to change the location for the Cluj meeting. See you at Cafenea La Margelatu’!

We are happy to announce the Startup Challenge 2011 competition. This year’s competition is dedicated to Central and Eastern European web startups ready to present their products or services in front of a jury and receive their competent feedback. Projects registration is open until October the 20^th for a chance of participating in the final, which will take place during the How To Web 2011 conference, on the 9^th and 10^th of November, with an audience of more than 750 domain specialists.

In order to participate in the Startup Challenge competition, the startups must comply to a few conditions: they must have a product designed for a global or international market, less than 2 years of activity on the market, but a real product or service to show, they haven’t raised any VC funding until the present moment. The final stage of the competition will take place during the How To Web 2011 conference in Bucharest when 10 of the projects will be presented to the Startup Challenge jury, which will choose the most valuable startup. The jury will take choose the winner by analysing each business model, the technology used by each startup, the team, the target audience identification and the type of problem the startup wants to solve.

The Startup Challenge jury is formed of top web professionals like Jon Bradford (Springboard Managing Director) and Chris Kowalczyk (GammaRebels.com Founder) and many other online specialists, investors and serial entrepreneurs.

Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp Partner and Startup Challenge jury member, who has also been part of the Startup Challenge 2010 jury: – “In the last two years we’ve seen more and more Eastern European teams winning at Seedcamp due to their big and disruptive ideas, focus on execution and excelent techical skills. This is why we’re interested in supporting the local ecosystem and meeting the next wave of web entrepreneurs.”

Each of the startups taking part in the Startup Challenge competition will benefit from individual meetings with the jury members, meetings intended to provide them with valuable feedback. Apart from the valuable feedback that the participants will receive from the jury and the conference participants, all the finalists will receive one free ticket to How To Web 2011 and a second 50% discounted ticket. Also, they will have the change to prepare a Startup Corner for their business and present their activity to interested How To Web 2011 participants. All the 10 finalists will get to present their startup during a 5-minute session on the main stage of the event in from of the conference audience.

If you want to apply for the Startup Challenge 2011 and think you meet the entry criteria, submit your details on the Startup Challenge dedicated section until the 20th of October 2011. Check the How To Web 2011 website for more details.

Looking over your schedule for the next week and finding it a bit empty? Here’s an event no web and mobile lover should miss. Eastern European Mobile Monday Developer Summit takes place in Bucharest from the 26th to the 28th of September, at the World Trade Center.

EEMMDS, the most important event in Eastern Europe dedicated to the mobile industry, is powered by Mobile Monday, the most important open platform on mobile communications in the world. The three days event will host conferences, workshops, exhibitions and competitions. With a large variety of topics ranging from augmented reality to marketing and from applications development to publicity and new media, it gives all the attendants the possibility to learn, create and test together with experienced world class specialists.

The speakers’ list includes names like Raimo van der Klein (CEO at Layar, the world’s leading mobile augmented reality), Eric Riess (CEO at FatDUX Group, a full-service interactive agency), Klemens Schrattenbacher (Senior Alliance Manager at Research in Motin), Keith Bauwise (Technical Evangelist at Samsung) and many more.

So if this sounds appealing to you, register on mobilemondaysummit.com and prepare for 3 great mobile tech days!

How to Web is a media partner for Eastern European Mobile Monday Developer Summit.

Sofia web community, we’re coming to meet you! We’re working hard on preparing for our conference in November and we’d like to have as many attendees from the Eastern European community there. But before that, we’re leaving on a road tour through some of the most important tech cities in EE.

Our first stop is Sofia, where we’ll be crashing the Open coffee meeting on the 27th of September. Come meet us, at Club Studio 5 at 19 o’clock, for a coffee and a nice chat about the Eastern European web scene and How to Web’s contribution to it. You’ll be meeting Bogdan Iordache, How to Web CEO and co-founder.

In the next few weeks, we’ll also be traveling to Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest, Timisoara, Cluj, Sibiu, Craiova and Iasi. So, local communities, keep a close eye on our blog. We’ll be announcing the dates and places for our meetings very soon.

All companies out there have a mission statement and a core value structure that they hold to. But do entrepreneurs themselves, as business people, as CEOs of their own company, as employers for a team, as men relate to the same core principles as companies do?

In secular perception, “value” is defined as “an absolute or relative ethical value, the assumption of which can be the basis for ethical action.” In economic terms, “value” symbolizes “a good or service as determined by the market“. Nowadays, the definition of values, ethics, moral behavior and perception is puzzled by the people we encounter and the situations we are engrossed in. More than once, my value does not equal the value of the one standing next to me, therefore, creating a social and business void one finds difficulty in overcoming.

One stereotypical image that hovers around the concept of the “entrepreneur” is the sly, step-on-business-bodies type of person, just the one who cares for no one but himself and nothing but his own advancement. No doubt there was no smoke without fire and that in the business world we can find just this type of “business professionals”. And, indeed, we do sometimes see the correlation between “entrepreneurship” and “illegal funding” “rip off unsuspecting people” , “business dealers” and so on. Then, what this relation leads us to is the perception that the entire scheme of entrepreneurs is characterized by lack of moral values and ethical grounds.

If we were to prove disbelievers wrong, which would be the core values of entrepreneurs nowadays? To my mind, I would name a few:

• Integrity
• Tenacity
• Persistence
• Discipline

Integrity

I don’t know how many of the readers of this article share the view that the saying “Treat others as you would like to be treated” applies to business as well. Respect for one’s self and others is essential. What it does is  enable the individual to appreciate his or her efforts, relate effectively to partners, employees, collaborators, community; as well as  motivating others. This respect for business in itself, competition, and looking at the spectrum of the market with absolute integrity frees entrepreneurs from low self-esteem, hopelessness, and sometimes anger.

Tenacity and persistence

Tenacity and persistence go hand and in hand. The ability to stand against any block-stops, bad investments, think skin competition is a matter of great resistance. Napoleon named persistence as “persistence [the quality] is to the character of man what carbon is to steel.” Both tenacity and persistence applied to business should be part of the essence of being an entrepreneur. Doug Richard is famous for saying that “Entrepreneurship can be taught”. But it is a layer on top of a valuable material: shape the diamond, but do not alter the inside fabric.

Discipline

Nothing is possible without ambition and the self taught discipline: not business, not sports, not learning. One should realize that when it comes to creation, development, and in our case technical innovation, not all leaders become amazingly brilliant without being stunningly rudimentary first.

Entrepreneurship is not a values-free, amoral process. The very act of starting and building something of significance should require a consideration of values — of combining what is done with how it is done.We should not leave aside vision and business bravery. Vision guides the entrepreneur through the business planning process, clarifying the opportunity, identifying possible threats and setting precise goals, marked with well defined milestones. Bravery, which results from natural creativity and an ambitions spirit, comes in handy in time of business hurricanes.

Therefore, there may be lessons which entrepreneurs do not learn during business classes or incubator’s mentorship sessions. It may be very much possible that entrepreneurs that neglect the core principles of being first an ethical person, next a moral business man, may experience temporary success. It is, however, not the case for continuous business growth, but the road to disappointment, downfall, insolvency.

What do you think? Which are the core values of being an entrepreneur? How can these traits be employed to achieve financial mastery?

We got word that wegetthere, a nice Romanian startup, got accepted for The European Pirate Summit. And you know us, curious to the bone and pretty handy when it comes to getting in contact with people and finding out cool insights. So we’re happy to share with you a few things about wegetthere, the crowdfunding platform for travelers, straight from founder David Nagy.

How to web: In a few words, how does wegetthere serve it’s customer?
David Nagy: wegetthere is the place where travellers help each other travel more. The first crowdfunding platform dedicated to travellers, explorers and adventurers.

People can raise money for their meaningful trip from their family, friends, the community and even companies and, in return, the supporters get groovy rewards.

How to Web: What market is wegetthere aimed at?
David Nagy: We plan to launch in the UK at the beginning, focused on people who want to take gap years or similar kind of trips. We’re doing this because as far as it seems, it’s the biggest market for this particular thing and it’s focused enough so that it will keep us focused too till we’ll be ready to go worldwide. Baby steps… you know?

How to Web: As I understood, you are now in the process of crowdfunding your participation for The European Pirate Summit. How are things looking? Will you get to Cologne in time?
David Nagy: Yes, I started a call to crowdfund my participation at the European Pirate Summit, more about that here.

But actually, this Supporter Wall we have on wegetthere.com/supporter is our own crowdfunding initiative to raise awareness and also money to help us build the platform (I’ve been working full time on this project since almost 6 months now with little to no income).

Thanks to a few amazing persons, I am sure we’ll get enough cash so I can go and, in pirate terms, take the sea by storm.

How to Web: What are your expectations for The European Pirate Summit? How do you hope wegetthere will benefit from it?
David Nagy: I expect to meet a lot of cool and interesting people who are doing some really amazing stuff. Wegetthere will get in front of a lot of business angels & Vcs, hopefully it/we/I will get their attention, and maybe even their money (sooner or later… )

How to Web: Can you give us a hint on how much we have to wait before we see wegethere go live? What’s the status on the work?
David Nagy: If all goes according to plan we will launch this year. For those really courious people we’ve got some stuff to show, but that’s only going to happen “in person”. So if you want to know more or have any feedback you can reach me at david@wegetthere.com and if you want to know when we are going to go live, please sign up on the website, I promise you beautiful surprises. Keep close!

Dear startup-ers, prepare your pitches and don’t miss this! On November, 11-13, the second Startup Weekend Romania event will take place in Bucharest. Together with other Startup Weekend events from all over the world, it will happen during the Global Entrepreneurship Week and the winning teams will compete in the second annual Global Startup Battle. So far, there are 51 registered cities, including San Francisco, Copenhagen, Sao Paulo, Kathmandu, Prishtina, Bangalore, Skopje and New York City.

The Bucharest event will be hosting speeches from Mikko Järvenpää from HackFwd and Radu Georgescu from GECAD. The startups present will be mentored by Felix Petersen from Amen, Vlad Stan from SeedMoney.ro and Lucian Gramescu from Junior Achievement Romania.

Startup Weekend is an intense 54-hour event that focuses on building a web or mobile application, which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skill-sets – primarily software developers, graphics designers and business people – to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.

For more information and to purchase your ticket, visit http://romania.startupweekend.org or follow @SWVampire.

How to Web is media partner of the Startup Weekend Romania event.

What will happen in the next 7 weeks? We’ll rock your world! We’ll disrupt your entrepreneurial mindset! We’ll take you to the 9th cloud of technology! We’ll engage you into the social community of ambitious people and great visionaries! We’ll share the How To Web passion and spirit!

But you must prove yourself worthy!

So, we’ll give you the opportunity to engage, test, share and promote the How To Web values: Inspiring entrepreneurs, connecting Eastern Europe to the Global Web, creating opportunities, sharing know-how, thinking success, open minds!

What will you have to do? Accept our challenges:

On Twitter:

- The most active #howtoweb Twitterer within a week receives a T-Shirt with How To Web logo and a special message from our team and the possibility of buying a ticket at a very early discount (121 euro)

- How it works: tweet the most interesting things, in your opinion, about How To Web 2011; RT our tweets; post materials, interviews, recommendations and articles related to entrepreneurs, startups and any other knowledge resources related to How To Web idea or event’s topics. There is plenty of material so please share as much relevant content as you can! Be careful! Don’t forget to use the #howtoweb hashtag so we can track you! The winner will be announced early morning – the following week. The TwChallenge ends on the 7th November!

On Facebook:

- Propose a weekly debate on our Facebook page – with a subject related to entrepreneurial challenges, such as: financing, investing, seed-funding, business accelerators, team-work, cloud computing, sales & pitching tips, technology challenges, approaching international markets, mobile apps and advertising – the next “hot” stuff?; etc

- The most commented subject receives a book on entrepreneurial and inspirational subjects and the opportunity to buy a 121 Euro ticket ( we won’t take into account likes and brief comments like: “Yes!”, “I agree”, “I disagree”, “True”, “Awesome” etc) Please argument your opinion! That is what a true leader and business person does!

And, we are preparing weekly happy hours for our fans, friends and followers, Happy Hours with a special code of 25% discount of the ticket price! So, keep a very close eye on us!

In addition to that, we might spontaneously want to meet you during some How To Web Meetups! We’ll just have to figure it out if it’s going to be formal…or just challenge you to a bowling session!

That been said: We are going to rock the Eastern Europe entrepreneurial scene! Will you be on it? Are you ready to accept the challenges? Join us for the top web business and technology conference in the region – How to Web 2011!

PS. And for those of you who want to add a supporter badge to your site or blog, just copy/paste one of the codes below. Much appreciated!

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<a href=”http://how-to-web.net/” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://how-to-web.net/resources/supporter-125.jpg” alt=”Proud supporter of How to Web” width=”125″></a>

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<a href=”http://how-to-web.net/” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://how-to-web.net/resources/supporter-250.jpg” alt=”Proud supporter of How to Web” width=”250″></a>

The pirate spirit is catching on. With The European Pirate Summit only a few days away, we found another pack of Pirates going out to sea. The Startup Pirates have just organized their first event in Porto, last week. And that was only the beginning of what they, and we, hope will be a worldwide phenomenon.

The Startup Pirates is a movement that wants to create one-week Startup Schools around the world, bringing together the latest discoveries in the technology field with the experience and talent of successful entrepreneurs.

What does the Startup Pirates Movement bring new to the scene?

It all sounds really good to us, so we tried to get a bit more detail about what the Startup Pirates Movement is bringing new to the scene of startup support programs. Here’s what Joao Oliveira, one of the original Startup Pirates, told us: “We’ve clearly identified a lack of opportunities to get the knowledge and tools to create a startup in the current educational system and, based on our experience, we figured out that there a lot of great events but they just have one of two approaches: theoretical and practical. In the Startup Pirates program we combine both with the experience and insights from talented and successful entrepreneurs with a more hands-on approach. This way we believe that we’re going to empower people to become more disruptive, creative and entrepreneurial bringing more ideas into real projects. We also support our teams after the event. We have a partnership with a crowdfunding platform, Dreamtby.me,  to which Startup Pirates teams have easy access.”

How about organizing your own Startup Pirates event?

As we mentioned earlier, the Startup Pirates Movement is supposed to catch on all around the world, through locally organized events. Does this ring a bell to any of you? Here’s what Joao had to say about this: “We’re looking for highly-motivated organizations/teams that want to boost an entrepreneurial mindset in their region. Our role is to help and support them with our knowledge and expertise to maximize the output of our program. We strongly believe Startup Pirates is a fantastic way to foster an entrepreneurial attitude in any community.” Oh, and here’s a nice presentation about the movement!

What happened in Porto?

Porto was the host of the first Pirate Startup event. Joao gave us a few insights about who attended and how it all went.

“Last week at Startup Pirates@Porto, our first event, we had an amazing group of Pirates. People from 5 different countries (Portugal, Argentina, South Africa, Germany and UK) with different backgrounds (eg: Pharmacy, Architecture, Psychology, History of Arts, Design, IT or Civil Engineering) between 17 and 41 years old. They did a wonderful job and the best three ideas were selected to be pre-incubated at UPTEC, our local incubator.

However, this program was clearly thought for engineering students or recent undergrads that want to launch their own projects right after college, but feel they need more knowledge in the business side of the company.

The Startup Pirates@Porto was an overwhelming experience for participants, entrepreneurs and organisers and we received amazing feedback from the investors who were in the Final Pitches session.  We had ideas from different fields, from sustainable construction to online games, but most of them were related with the web and the mobile area. Anyway the teams still have a lot of work to do but they’re on the right track after Startup Pirates.”